Drive
the Zionists Out of the Occupied Territories!
Drive the U.S. Imperialists Out of Iraq and All the Near East!

The
following article is expanded from a July 18 leaflet issued by the
Internationalist Group, U.S. section of the League for the Fourth
International.

On
July 14, Israel began a full-scale assault on Lebanon, bombing targets,
military and civilian, throughout the country. First on the list was
Beirut’s
airport, followed by blowing up 55 bridges and all highways leading out
of the
country. Tens of thousands of Lebanese managed to rush to the Syrian
border
before the main roads were destroyed, but now the entire Lebanese
population is
trapped. Westerners are being evacuated by sea, and many Lebanese are
worried
that Israel will escalate its bombing as soon as they are gone. Having
blockaded the country, the Zionist militarists are proceeding to
pulverize the
southern part of the capital, flattening whole city blocks, as well as
attacking cities and Palestinian refugee camps from north to south. To
date
(July 21) over 350 Lebanese have been killed in the massive and
indiscriminate
Israeli bombing. Meanwhile, over the past month Israeli tanks have
returned to
Gaza, cutting the narrow territory in half, blocking deliveries of food
and
fuel and killing over 100 Palestinian Arabs.

Working
people the world over must vigorously denounce and fight against the
two-pronged Israeli attack, which along with the U.S. imperialist
occupation of
Iraq threatens to engulf the entire Near East in war.

Particularly
hard-hit in the Israeli onslaught against Lebanon have been the Shiite
Muslim
communities where the Islamic organization Hezbollah is strong. There,
the
Israeli air force is massacring the civilian population, including many
children, killing whole families in their homes, trucks carrying
medical
supplies, United Nations “peacekeepers,” milk processing plants, even
Lebanese
army barracks. Hezbollah responded by firing waves of Katyusha rockets
into
northern Israel. They hit the port city of Haifa for the first time
ever, and a
missile or drone took out an Israeli warship. The Israeli army made an
initial
foray into southern Lebanon, but pulled back after meeting stiff
resistance.
Nevertheless, the air attack has manifestly failed to “degrade”
Hezbollah’s
military capacity. So Israel has mobilized its army reserves, which
exacts a
tremendous economic cost, indicating a full-scale ground invasion is in
the
offing.

Leaders of the
Zionist state portray their assault as “retaliation” for
Hezbollah’s July 12 stunning attack on Israeli military forces on the
border,
in which eight soldiers were killed and two captured. This effective
action
left the Israeli army smarting, but what followed is far more than a
reprisal.
It was “a wonderful option to do something the army was already
prepared to do,
with a well-constructed operational plan on the shelf,” commented the
head of
an Israeli “peace” center. War minister Amir Peretz, head of the
Zionist
“Labor” Party, declared that “we shall not allow Hezbollah forces to
remain any
further on the borders of the state of Israel.” The only way that can
be
accomplished is by an occupation by Israel or some “international”
force doing
its bidding. The last time Israel tried this, in 1982, it was bogged
down in
southern Lebanon for 18 years and was ultimately forced out by
Hezbollah
guerrillas.

Whatever
the pretext used by Israel to justify its aggression, the international
workers
movement must stand squarely for defense of the Palestinian people and
Lebanese
Shiite population under attack, and for the defeat of the Israeli
assault. The
current invasion of Lebanon is part of an overall plan by the Zionist
expansionists to unilaterally redraw the borders of the Near East and
impose
their military dominance on the Arab peoples. Having declared the bogus
“peace
process” dead, they intend to fence in thePalestinians
and confine them to giant prisons in Gaza and
the West
Bank, Zionist settlements will fill in huge swaths of the Occupied
Territories,
and the stage will be set for a future mass expulsion, euphemistically
known in
Zionist circles as “transfer.” This “final solution” to the
“Palestinian
problem” today is openly avowed only by Zionist hardliners, but it is
the logic
of the decades-old policy of “creating facts on the ground.”

There
is no “equivalence” between the blows struck by the Lebanese Shiite
Hezbollah
and Palestinian groups such as Hamas, Islamic Jihad and various secular
nationalist resistance forces on the one hand, and the Zionist military
juggernaut
on the other. The Zionists and imperialists brand Hezbollah as
“terrorist,”when they are the biggest
state terrorists
of all. Contrary to the hysteria trumpeted by the bourgeois press in
the West,
the existence of the Hebrew-speaking population of Israel is in no way
threatened today, whereas the Palestinian Arabs and Lebanese Shiites
are very
much in danger of being decimated and driven out of their lands.
Proletarian
internationalists stand with those resisting Zionist occupation. The
League for
the Fourth International calls to drive the Zionists out of all the
territories
conquered by Israel in the 1967 war, including East Jerusalem, as well
as from
Lebanon. All the West Bank settlements are military outposts for the
subjugation of the Palestinians.

The
deliberate targeting of the civilian population in Lebanon by Israeli
commanders
has led even that pliant imperialist tool, U.N. commissioner for human
rights
Louise Arbour, to talk of war crimes. These are empty words, of course;
nothing
will be done against the war criminals in Tel Aviv, or the U.S.
political and
military commanders who have slaughtered over 100,000 Iraqis. While
noting that
Israeli attacks on Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank are far deadlier,
massacring
whole villages and neighborhoods, deliberately bombing refugee columns,
communists oppose indiscriminate attacks on the general population of
Israel
such as suicide bombings of non-military targets. A Hezbollah rocket
recently
struck a railway repair shop in Haifa, which has a large Arab
population,
killing eight workers. Another barrage hit the Arab town of Nazareth in
northern Israel, killing two Palestinian children at play.

Revolutionary
Marxists recognize the right of self-determination of both the
Palestinian Arab
and Hebrew-speaking peoples, that is, their right to national existence
in the
area. The creation of the state of Israel, a theocratic Jewish state
which is
inherently oppressive to the Palestinians, was a historic crime by the
Western
imperialists, coming on top of the monstrous annihilation of 6 million
European
Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. Instead of accepting the Jewish refugees
from the
fascist slaughter, the “democratic” imperialists pushed them into
Palestine.
But the fact is that there is now a Hebrew-speaking nation in the same
area as
the Palestinian Arab population, and proletarian revolutionaries defend
the
democratic rights of both. At the same time, we warn that the
conflicting
national rights can only be equitably resolved through workers
revolution.

Imperialists Trumpet
“Peace”
and “Democracy” While
Delivering Death and Destruction

The
phony Near East “peace” process collapsed with the Camp David talks in
2000,
when U.S. president Bill Clinton demanded Palestinians submit to the
carving up
of the West Bank. This was driven home by the subsequent provocation
staged by
Ariel Sharon at the Al Aksa Mosque with the full cooperation of the
“Labor”
Zionist government of Ehud Barak. Since then many Palestinian secular
nationalists
and Israeli leftists have abandoned their earlier support for a
Palestinian
“mini-state” and call for a democratic, secular Palestine, the original
program
of the Palestine Liberation Organization. However, there is no way that
under
capitalism there can be a democratic solution to the conflict between
two
competing claims to national self-determination on the same territory.
How
would water rights be divided between Israel and Palestine, for
example? What
about the undeniable right to return of the Palestinian refugees forced
from
their homes in 1948?

U.S.
imperialist warmonger in chief George W. Bush claims to be fighting for
“democracy” in Iraq and throughout the Near East, except when people
make the
“wrong” choice. The current round of fighting began with the Israeli
army
returning to Gaza to punish the population for voting for the Islamist
Hamas.
In addition to cutting off the flow of funds in order to strangle the
Palestinians economically, Israel has bombed Palestinian Authority
offices,
arrested one-third of the PA cabinet members and targeted Hamas leaders
for
assassination. For good measure, the Israeli military blew up the main
power
plant in Gaza and murdered an entire Arab family on the beach. But in
all their
frenzy against Hamas, Zionist propagandists leave out that Israel
helped set up
the organization, funneling substantial sums to it, to serve as a
counterweight
to the Palestinian nationalist Fatah.

Many
pseudo-socialists today give political support (“critical,” of course)
to the
Islamist Hamas, just as yesterday they tailed after Fatah and its
leader Yasir
Arafat, on the grounds that they are opposed by the Zionists. Yet both
Arab
nationalists and Islamists are more than prepared to do a deal with
imperialism,
if only they could. In contrast, the Trotskyists of the
Internationalist Group
and LFI, defend the Palestinian people while opposing all religiously
based
states, whether a Jewish state of Israel or an Islamic state in Iran or
U.S.-occupied
Iraq. We hold that in the case of historically intermingled or
interpenetrated
peoples, the only possible framework for a just solution to national
rights is
under proletarian rule, when the working people of all nationalities,
peoples
and minorities can resolve democratic questions through their common
efforts in
a collective economy.

“The child whose dead
body lies like a rag doll beside the cars which were supposedly taking
her and her family to safety is a symbol of the latest Lebanon war”
(Robert Fisk). Name unknown, her parents were also killed in Israeli
attack on refugee column outside Ter Harfa, Lebanon, July 15. (Photo: Nasser Nasser/AP)

In the
present case, while recognizing the right of national
self-determination on
behalf of both the Palestinian Arab and Hebrew-speaking peoples, we
fight for
an Arab-Hebrew workers state in a socialist federation of the Near
East. This
can only be achieved by joint struggle of the working people against
their
Zionist, Islamic fundamentalist and Arab nationalist rulers.

In
Lebanon, as well, the imperialists and Zionists claimed to be
supporting
“democracy.” Last year they stage-managed a “Cedar Revolution,” forcing
Syrian
forces to leave the country and setting up a puppet government in
Beirut. The
gilded youth of the Christian and Sunni Muslim Lebanese bourgeoisie –
hip young
men in their BMW sports cars, sleek young women with their Armani
accessories –
provided TV images of mass support. Many of these are now bitter that
the
reward for their efforts is renewed destruction of a country still
being
rebuilt three decades after a ruinous civil war and after two decades
of
Israeli occupation in the south. Impoverished Shiites, on the other
hand,
participated in pro-Syrian demonstrations that were not televised.
While giving
no political support to the Syrian regime, Marxists point out that
Lebanon was
carved out of Syria after World War I by the French colonialists
as an
artificial state, then dominated by pro-Western Christian forces, in
order to
hold Arab nationalism in check. As demonstrated in the civil war of
1975-90,
Lebanon is a checkerboard of communalist enclaves, which under
capitalist rule
will always be oppressive to one minority or another (Shiites,
Christians,
Alawites, Druzes, etc.)

There
are similarities between the latest attack and the 1982 invasion, when
the Israeli
army rolled up to Beirut and oversaw a massacre of Palestinians by the
fascistic
Christian Falange in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. But the
today{s
attack comes in a new context, of U.S.-led imperialist invasions and
colonial
occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, the Israeli invasion of
Lebanon
is clearly being done in conjunction with its patrons in the White
House and
the Pentagon, where a powerful pro-Israel camarilla has given a green
light to
the Zionist expansionists. Palestinian “president” Mahmoud Abbas, a
figurehead
without a state or a government, warned that the attack on Lebanon
could lead
to a regional war. In fact, Israel has already launched the war. The
Zionists
are counting on the Saudi, Egyptian and other reactionary Arab regimes
to do
nothing, and is calling for the Lebanese government to control
Hezbollah, which
it will not and cannot do. As a result, many European imperialists in
the Group
of 8 meeting in the tsarist palaces of St. Petersburg, Russia, have
called for
United Nations intervention. But U.N. “blue helmets” will only serve as
mercenary border police on behalf of Israel and U.S. imperialism.

Israeli
and Western imperialist spokesmen are portraying the present conflict
as a
“proxy war” with Iran, a main sponsor of the Hezbollah. While there is
no
evidence that Tehran had anything to do with the capture of a couple of
Israeli
soldiers on the Lebanese border, it is clear that the Zionists and
their
supporters in the U.S. have been pushing for a showdown with the
Persian ruling
mullahs for years. A Zionist hawk writing in the New York
“neoconservative” City
Journal (Spring 2006) recently called for an attack on Iran of
“swift,
massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime – but no
occupation.” An
attack on Iran would be the height of folly for the U.S. military,
already
bogged down in Iraq. But that may not deter the warmongers in the White
House,
the Pentagon and the U.S. Congress, on both sides of the aisle, from
“unleashing” the Israelis who have an arsenal of hundreds of atomic
bombs, the
means to deliver them and a leadership insane enough to set off a
conflagration
that could end up consuming Israel.

A
military attack on Iran, however demented and improbable, is the ultima
ratio, the final “argument” of the imperialist hue and cry over
Iran’s
efforts to develop nuclear power, fully within its rights under the
U.S.-imposed “non-proliferation” treaties. As Trotskyists who never
gave
political support to the Islamic “Iranian Revolution,” and who call for
workers
revolution to bring down the reactionary rule of the mullahs and imams,
the IG
and LFI defend semi-colonial Iran and its right to obtain nuclear
weapons for
self-defense against the nuclear-armed imperialists and Zionists.
Similarly,
even under the anti-Communist butcher Saddam Hussein, revolutionary
Marxists
defended Iraq and its right to develop any weapons needed for defense
againstthe imperialist mass murderers who
have
since laid waste to the country with a Hitler-style Blitzkrieg and
ruinous
colonial occupation. Trotskyists also unconditionally defend the North
Korean
bureaucratically deformed workers state against imperialism, while
fighting for
political revolution to replace the nationalist Stalinist bureaucracy
with a
proletarian internationalist leadership.

Hezbollah
and Hamas may have grievously misjudged the Israeli government in
figuring it
would agree to an exchange of three Israeli soldiers for some of the
estimated
9,000 Palestinians (and an unknown number of Lebanese) being held in
Israel’s
jails. But the Israeli rulers may have made a far greater
miscalculation in
figuring that they could launch a new war and keep it within strict
limits.
Even the Wall Street Journal (20 July), normally a big backer
of any and
every Israeli adventure or atrocity, worries: “But escalating the
conflict is
risky for Israel. The casualties would likely be far greater than the
Israeli
military has experienced so far. The operation could fail, dealing a
devastating blow to Israel's reputation in the region.” While many
opportunist
leftists who habitually tail after “Third World” nationalists consider
Israel
as nothing but an imperialist outpost, the real relationship between
the
Zionists and the imperialists is more complex. Strategic Forecasting, a
corporate military analysis outfit, recently noted:

“Israel
has national
security requirements that outstrip its manpower base. It can field a
sufficient
army, but its industrial base cannot supply all of the weapons needed
to fight
high-intensity conflicts. This means it is always dependent on an
outside
source for its industrial base and must align its policies with that
source….
It was after 1967 that it entered into a patron-client relationship
with the
United States. This relationship is its strength and its weakness. It
gives the
Israelis the systems they need for national security, but since U.S.
and
Israeli interests diverge, the relationship constrains Israel’s range
of
action.”

–Stratfor, Mideast Crisis: Backgrounder
(14 July 2006)

Socialism or Barbarism

For U.S.
imperialism,
control of the Near East is key to its exercise of world domination,
not so
much to supply its own energy needs but to be able to turn the oil
spigot on
and off, and thereby to have the whip hand over imperialist rivals.
Already,
the Israeli attack sent the oil price soaring to a record $78 per
barrel. Washington
has sought to impose a Pax
Americana on the
strategic region for decades, particularly since the 1989-92 East
European
counterrevolution that brought down the Soviet Union and whetted U.S.
appetites
for a New World Order, with it as the “sole superpower.” The Zionists,
of
course, have always sought to sell their services to imperialism, going
back to
when they got a British foreign minister to issue the famous Balfour
Declaration
in 1917 by offering to act as gendarmes for Britain astride the vital
Suez
Canal. But the interests of the Zionists and the imperialists are not
identical.
Indeed, rabid Israeli right-wingers are prepared to blow up the world
in
pursuit of their messianic expansionist plans.

As
bombs fell on Beirut, Democrats and Republicans alike rushed to defend
Israeli
aggression, with war hawk Hillary Clinton taking the lead in
missile-rattling.
For now, U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and U.N. ambassador
John
Bolton have beaten downcalls for
United Nations action to impose a ceasefire or send a “peacekeeping”
force.
After a couple more weeks of Israeli bombing and ground incursions in
which
Israel will try to “clear” the population south of the Litani River,
turning it
into a “free-fire” zone, military “experts” say, Washington will seek
to
organize a “multinational” force, perhaps like the NATO expeditionary
force in
Afghanistan, to police southern Lebanon and enforce a U.N. Security
Council resolution
calling for disarming Hezbollah. But, as the Wall Street Journal (17
July) noted, peacekeeping presumes the parties want to make peace. If
Hezbollah, with wide backing in the local Shiite population, refuses to
be
disarmed and undertakes guerrilla war, it won’t be “peacekeeping” or
even
“stabilization” but counterinsurgency, at which Israel already
failed to
“prevail” in Lebanon during 1982-2000, and the Americans aren’t doing
so hot in
Iraq either. If Israel should strike at Syria or Iran, it would
reverberate
throughout the region. And if one of the decrepit conservative Arab
regimes
were to topple in the face of mass protest over the war, the example
could
spread like an oil slick.

Recently
a mainstream pro-Zionist columnist, Michael Goodwin, declared that
“World War
III has begun,” and that the key is “The U.S. must prevail” – along
with Israel
of course (New York Daily News, 16 July). “Prevailing” in a
nuclear war
– against what adversary, and how? This is not just the ravings of a
pundit
gone haywire but official U.S. doctrine. In the Clinton administration
excerpts
from a classified “Defense Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years
1994-1999”
were leaked which set the goal of “precluding the emergence of any
potential
future global competitor,” like the U.S.’ NATO allies. In the Bush II
administration, war secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Quadrennial Defense
Review
called to “prevail against current threats” and to “dissuade potential
adversaries.”
like the U.S.’ NATO allies. With the Cold War deterrent strategy of
“mutually
assured destruction” (MAD) gone, has some evil genius in the Pentagon
dreamt up
a new strategic doctrine of “nuclear unilateral total slaughter”
(NUTS)? That
is clearly the direction that the “Bush doctrine” of preemptive war
points.

At the
St. Petersburg Group of 8 summit, U.S. president Bush remarked at a
private
dinner to Russian president Vladimir Putin that he desired to “promote
institutional change in parts of the world like Iraq – where there is a
free
press and free religion” (!) and he hoped that “Russia would do the
same
thing.” When Putin icily replied that “we certainly would not want to
have the
same kind of democracy as they have in Iraq,” Bush retorted, “Just
wait” (New
York Times, 16 July). This kind of off-hand remark from the leader
of the
world’s most powerful imperialist power – who declared that he was
“driven with
a mission from god” to invade Afghanistan and Iraq and who is pursuing
a
Manichean battle against an “axis of evil” – isn’t likely to endear the
U.S. to
“potential future global competitors” that it wants to “dissuade.” As
inter-imperialist squabbles over Iraq, Israel and other world conflicts
multiply, trade wars such as between European and U.S. airplane
manufacturing
rivals Airbus and Boeing or the fight over the Russian oil company
Yukos, can
escalate to other forms of competition. And Russia still has the
military
wherewithal to annihilate the U.S. several times over.

To
note that Israel’s invasion of Lebanon is on a course toward an
inter-imperialist World War III is not to say that it is about to break
out
tomorrow. Rather, we are in a period of clashes building up to the main
event,
such as the Balkan Wars that preceded World War I, or the 1930s
Japanese
invasion of China and the Spanish Civil War prior to World War II. The
timing
is not pre-determined and events such as the current Israeli attack in
the
midst of a raging civil war in Iraq can have unforeseen consequences.
Clearly,
the Israeli general staff didn’t count on Hezbollah having and using
missiles
that could hit Haifa and possibly Tel Aviv, or that could take out
Israeli
warships, any more than the Pentagon war planners prepared for an
extended and
deepening insurgency in Iraq. Israeli and U.S. generals may suffer
setbacks on
the battlefield, but what is key is how these colonial wars intersect
the class
struggle worldwide.

It is
on the home front that the imperialists and Zionists are ultimately
vulnerable.
Today, the Israeli public may be solidly lined up behind Prime Minister
Ehud
Olmert’s invasion. But let guerrilla attacks drag on endlessly with a
steady
drain of casualties and Israeli support for war will dissipate, as it
already
has in the U.S. It is then that the potential for sharp workers
struggle
against the war will increase. Israeli society is rent by a class
divide, as
are all the Arab countries, and the interests of the Hebrew-speaking
workers
(including many who came from elsewhere in the Near East and are native
Arab-speakers)
are not identical with those of their Zionist masters. Military
reverses and
sharp internal clashes (for example, over clericalism) can break the
regimentation of a besieged fortress, and the mass of the Israeli
population
cannot wish to live forever in a garrison state. What will be required
is a
revolutionary leadership, a Trotskyist party, to make use of such
contradictions to open the road to united class struggle of Arab and
Hebrew
working people.

The
League for the Fourth International has called for, and sought to
initiate
where possible, class struggles against the imperialist war, including
“hot
cargoing” (refusing to handle) war material by transportation workers,
and
workers’ strikes against the war. Recent motions passed by the San
Francisco/Oakland
Local 10 of the West Coast International Longshore and Warehouse Union
calling
for the organization of a one-day labor strike against the war in Iraq
point,
and for union action against anti-immigrant vigilantes, although they
were
turned down by the ILWU bureaucracy, point in the right direction. The
same
program of class war against the imperialist war is valid in
the Israeli
attack on Lebanon and the Palestinian Arab population. Impotent
boycotts of
Israeli academics are ultimately appeals to U.S. imperialism (why not
call for
U.S. universities to refuse to hire American professors, since the U.S.
is
guilty of far greater war crimes than Israel?). Pious calls for U.N.
intervention will only aid Israel. Instead of these dead-ends,far more powerful would be action by
European and American dock workers refusing to load or unload ships
carrying
war cargo to Israel and Iraq.

At the
time of World War I, the German communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg
declared
that the choice facing mankind was barbarism or socialism. Certainly,
the Zionist
rulers of Israel and the imperialist warmongers in Washington show the
ugly
face of barbarism as they rape and pillage their way through Iraq and
dismember
the Palestinian people. We call on the workers of the world to unite in
class
struggle to drive the imperialists from Iraq and Afghanistan, to defeat
the
colonial occupation and the “war on terror” which is actually a drive
to
terrorize the world into submission, as well as to drive the Zionists
from all the
occupied territories, from Gaza to the West Bank to Lebanon. Above all,
the
struggle against imperialist war is a political fight. Against the
bipartisan
capitalist-imperialist war party, we seek to forge arevolutionary workers party, in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Ultimately, to put an end to the imperialist chamber of horrors, from
the
carnage of World War I to the Nazi holocaust (and U.S. atom bombing of
Japan)
in World War II, to the torture and murder camps of Abu Ghraib and
Guantánamo
today, it is necessary to sweep away the capitalist system through
international socialist revolution. n

For an Arab-Hebrew
Workers State in a Socialist Federation of the Near East!Smash Imperialism
Through International Socialist Revolution!